Sleeping and eating . . . NOT.

I am pretty much at my wits' end with this whole not sleeping and not eating thing.

Finn has not slept decently since January when he got sick with an ear infection and suspected RSV. Before that, he was sleeping 10 - 11 solid hours at night. He's never gone back to anything close to that. He's up and down, up and down all night, every night. I put him down in his bed where he'll sleep for an hour or two and then he starts wailing. If I am able to gather enough energy to sit with him, I do. I sit with him and nurse him and put him back down, and he might sleep for another hour tops. Usually, though, I am too tired to sit up with him and so I just put him in bed with me. But even this does not make him happy. He spends the entire night latching on and pulling off and whining and crying. It seems to be worse when I need to turn over and thereby put him on his left side. Sometimes I have to sit up - straight up, against pillows - with him on my chest, in order to calm him. This is how our nights go. Every single night.

I am convinced at this point that there is something physiological going on that is causing all these sleep problems. Despite the fact that I am not eager to have invasive procedures done to him, when the audiologist at his hearing screening told me that he has fluid in both ears and will likely need tubes placed, I sort of started seeing tubes as our possible salvation. However, the ENT we saw last week said it's a three-month process to determine if he actually needs tubes. He just finished up his antibiotics for the ear/sinus infection the ENT dx'd him with, and he does seem to be feeling much better, but still he won't/can't sleep.

Naps are a different story. He still naps in his swing. And he naps well. I assume it's because he's upright in his swing (and swaddled - yes, at nearly 9 months old, I still swaddle him for naps). Which also tells me that there's some physiological reason that he's not able to sleep well lying down. (And sometimes I do resort to the swing at night just so I can get an uninterrupted 2-hour chunk of sleep if I'm feeling really desperate.)

Somebody suggested to me that maybe he has "silent reflux." I have no idea. I know that he is a very spit-uppy baby - always has been and still is.

Anyway, he has an appt. tomorrow morning with our regular ped to recheck his ears (and what, I ask, is the point of that if it's true what so many people have said, that regular ped's don't have an ear scope thingy small enough for Ds ear canals???), and I really want to try to get to the bottom of his sleep issues, so I'm going to lay it all out for the good doctor and hope he can offer me something - something besides sleep training, because frankly, I just don't think that's the answer right now.

Also, Finn is scheduled for his surgery to have his testes moved down to their proper locations on Monday :( (And I am feeling some anxiety over this.) And all along I've thought that any sleep training would have to wait until after that's all over anyway.

As for eating:

He still doesn't really eat. He liked the avocado the first couple times I gave it to him, but then started refusing it. It seems to go that way with everything I try: banana, yogurt, peas, etc. He goes for it the first time or two and then flatly refuses. Being that he's nearly 9 months old, I'm feeling a great deal of pressure to get this kid eating solids already, and he's just not into it. It involves me pretty much force feeding him with a spoon - and I'm sure that's bad on all kinds of levels. There seems to be a fine line between being persistent and being forceful, and I fear that I'm just turning food into a big ol' turnoff for him. But he doesn't want to eat (and forget self-feeding - totally not happening). And it's not that I'm worried about his growth and weight gain, because I'm not. He's still growing just fine on breastmilk alone. But I think he needs to learn how to eat actual food. So I'm becoming terribly worried about him learning that skill for its own obvious value, and how eating affects speech development.

And I did ask our service coordinator for a consult with an OT so I could get some guidance on these eating issues, but she never got back to me, and with them now trying to reduce services, I assume there's no way I'm going to get anything extra unless it's a truly desperate situation. So I feel stuck.

Ack. So much to worry about.